If you’re scaling MCP use within an enterprise, the odds are you’re going to need some sort of gateway to govern how agents access MCP servers and tools. An MCP gateway is a helpful layer for unifying, monitoring, and controlling access to internal and third-party MCP servers. But should you build your own MCP gateway, or use a vendor-supplied one?
Below, we’ll review the benefits and potential pitfalls of building an MCP gateway from scratch and compare them to the pros and cons of using an off-the-shelf, fully managed MCP gateway. We’ll end with some recommendations to help software engineers and platform architects decide which approach best fits their requirements.
As we’ll see, building from scratch can work for limited, low-risk MCP usage. But a managed MCP gateway starts to make more sense when you need regulatory assurance, granular access controls, and visibility across developers, teams, and agents at scale. The key is to weigh the total cost of ownership against what your team can realistically build, secure, and maintain.
Building your own MCP gateway: the pros and cons
In the context of MCP gateways, going DIY offers complete control. However, this comes at the expense of significant engineering effort and requires very particular infrastructure expertise that software development teams typically lack.
Offers full control
Building an MCP gateway on your own provides complete control and customization of the feature set. This could benefit certain scenarios that require tight integration with internal tooling governance platforms, bespoke access management suites, or integrations that an off-the-shelf MCP gateway doesn’t support.
Whereas a commercial MCP gateway is built for generic use, a custom one lets teams build only the functionality the organization requires, avoiding feature bloat.
No recurring subscription
If you’re building from scratch, you avoid a monthly SaaS subscription for a vendor platform, which could save money on the monthly IT expense sheet.
Of course, this doesn’t mean gateway costs evaporate. Depending on your setup, building your own still incurs hosting fees and networking expenses. In certain situations, however, this could still be cheaper than buying a managed platform.
Open source gateways help
Some open-source MCP gateways exist, such as Agentgateway, Docker MCP Gateway, and Obot. These can help with proxying MCP traffic, centralizing configuration, managing credentials, or applying basic access controls. They can provide an onramp or reference architecture, too.
However, they should not be confused with a complete enterprise control plane out of the box.
Significant upfront engineering effort
Although building your own MCP gateway might seem alluring, the project is a significant undertaking. An enterprise-grade MCP gateway is not a simple shim. It involves building authentication and authorization mechanisms, a catalog for MCP servers, administrative controls for policies and limits, semantic MCP discovery for agents, and actually enforcing access to MCP tools at runtime.
Even with an open-source solution, you still must host the gateway, validate or extend the enforcement logic, manually integrate it with your identity and policy systems, and handle production traffic safely. All in all, the DIY route can slow your time to market and drain engineering resources.
High upfront and ongoing costs
When building highly specialized platform infrastructure from scratch, the costs can rack up. Software consultancy Soltech estimates that custom software projects often range from $100,000 to $750,000, with large enterprise projects exceeding that amount.
And although custom development can, in theory, keep things lean, teams will likely discover that minimal gateway functionality expands quickly to cover observability, compliance, runtime policy enforcement, and other requirements.
The world of AI moves fast, and agentic behavior and MCP server implementations vary widely, requiring ongoing adaptation. The underlying specification is also in flux, which demands continued effort to build against as the ecosystem evolves. Factor in ongoing engineering maintenance and operating expenses, and the risk of runaway costs becomes more likely.
Amplifies security risk
Cybersecurity experts rarely suggest building your own security infrastructure in-house, especially for layers intended to protect access to sensitive data or high-privilege write endpoints.
If you look at OWASP’s emerging list of MCP risks, many of them — such as token mismanagement, privilege escalation, command injection, and insufficient authentication and authorization — hinge on an AI-native, hardened underlying security architecture to mitigate effectively.
If you’re not prepared to understand emerging MCP, LLM, and API-based threats and develop the guardrails to respond effectively, you’re putting yourself in a risky position. Implemented incorrectly, an MCP gateway could even have the unintended effect of amplifying vulnerabilities like over-permissioned access, exposure to malicious rogue servers, and leaked credentials.
Not easily reproducible with AI
With today’s AI coding agents, the barrier to rebuilding common software-as-a-service components has never been lower. But while it might be easy to rebuild a dashboard or CRUD app over a weekend using Claude Code, an MCP gateway is not as easily reproducible using AI coding tools.
AI can probably help accelerate parts of the work, but it won’t replace the architectural judgment needed around identity, policy enforcement, traffic handling, and agent-specific security. These areas take significant context, expertise, and testing to get right.
Not aligned with expertise or core value
It bears repeating: building your own MCP gateway, or even maintaining an open-source gateway, is typically not aligned with the expertise within your average software engineering team. Many development teams are not staffed to operate specialized platform infrastructure.
Building a fully featured, enterprise-ready gateway requires deep specialization in HTTP traffic proxying, networking controls, web, identity, and AI standards, and more. Onboarding to these concepts and reinventing the wheel takes time and effort away from building functionality that supports the core business.
Buying a managed MCP gateway: the pros and cons
As you can see, there are many tradeoffs involved with building your own MCP gateway. On the other hand, purchasing an off-the-shelf, fully managed MCP gateway can deliver more enterprise assurances with a likely lower overall cost of ownership.
Enterprise-grade security
By using a fully managed MCP gateway, you get enterprise-ready security features out of the box. This spans controls for per-tool permissions, policies, logging, and rate limits, plus other functions to harden MCP server access with identity-based authentication and authorization, OAuth/OIDC support, and runtime enforcement.
For instance, Zuplo MCP Gateway takes enterprise assurance to the next level, offering SOC 2 Type II auditing, with controls that can support requirements like HIPAA or GDPR. Other managed MCP gateways, like TrueFoundry MCP Gateway or Operant MCP Gateway, provide administrator approval flows that help standardize tooling requests from developers in a compliant manner.
Decreased time to market
Developing a custom software project can take anywhere from four to nine months, says Clear Launch. By adopting a vendor-built MCP gateway, you avoid lengthy upfront development lifecycles so you can realize business value more quickly.
The AI market is moving incredibly fast, and AI-native vulnerabilities continue to emerge. Deploying a ready-made gateway secures your MCP ecosystem so your agents can safely leverage MCP capabilities in a matter of days, not months.
Time to market is made even quicker with MCP gateways that come pre-packaged with popular MCP servers. For instance, Composio MCP gateway comes with 1,000 pre-built MCP server integrations, so enterprise agents can get up and running with connectors to popular external platforms nearly instantly.
Compliant MCP access
Whether you’re integrating MCP servers from Linear, GitHub, Salesforce, Slack, Notion, or other providers, each third-party MCP server is designed and behaves slightly differently. Many aren’t compliant with the latest MCP specification, and some only allow API keys, not OAuth, which requires additional features on the client side to work around.
Using a ready-made gateway like Zuplo MCP Gateway, you can put OAuth-protected access in front of upstream MCP servers, regardless of their underlying security posture. You can also create virtualized MCP servers that curate exposed tools and capabilities, meaning client-side LLMs can only access what they need and nothing more, following a least-privilege security model.
Best-of-breed specialization
With a vendor gateway, you get a unified governance layer for MCP usage built by gateway experts who deeply understand the constraints of integration at scale. This manifests in gateway capabilities attuned to the unique problems that surface when using MCP: granular tool-level access policies, semantics for proper capability discovery, specification-driven server generation, compliance layers for internal servers, and more.
In short, homegrown proxies need considerable effort to mature, whereas integration experts can build with all of this in mind from day one.
Easier overall maintenance
In addition to decreased upfront development effort, you get lower maintenance costs using a managed MCP gateway. Beyond your typical operational overhead, a dedicated technology provider conducts R&D to continually improve gateway functionality.
This includes updating integrations with third-party MCP servers, making changes to coincide with evolutions in underlying industry-standard specifications and communication protocols, and adding cybersecurity enhancements to protect against emerging threats.
Lack of complete control
Like any software platform, a commercial MCP gateway makes certain assumptions about how it operates. This can show up in workflows, administrative controls, logging formats, and other areas.
Thankfully, some MCP gateways, like Zuplo MCP Gateway, are designed to be highly flexible, meaning you can produce and edit policies in a highly granular way. Other standards and best practices, such as IdP integration and exportable logs, can make a managed gateway adaptable to most circumstances.
Recurring subscription
Of course, commercial offerings come at a cost. Depending on the solution, it may be priced per seat, as a subscription, or by metered usage based on the number of underlying API requests the gateway brokers.
However, these costs are likely to be offset by the reduction in manual labor to both construct and maintain the gateway. Plus, if MCP support is built into an API gateway the enterprise already uses, as with Zuplo MCP Gateway, the subscription concern may be less significant.
When it makes sense to build vs. buy an MCP gateway
Just as it’s best practice to have an API gateway around an API that you expose to internal enterprise users or partners, it’s similarly becoming commonplace to wrap MCP servers in a gateway layer. But how you go about this depends on your scenario.
Here’s the short version before we dig into the details:
| Approach | Best fit | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Build from scratch | A few low-risk, read-only servers where full control is key | High upfront and ongoing cost, plus security ownership |
| Repurpose open source | Teams comfortable forking, at small-to-medium scale | Integration and hardening are still on you |
| Buy a managed gateway | Enterprise scale, sensitive or write access, compliance demands | Recurring subscription and some loss of control |
Building an MCP gateway from scratch makes sense when:
- You are a small organization and only operate a few low-risk MCP servers.
- You only require a simple shim with basic access controls.
- You are not allowing write access to any MCP tools.
- You are manually vetting each MCP server for supply chain risks.
- You have the engineering resources to maintain the gateway.
Repurposing an open-source gateway solution makes sense when:
- You are comfortable forking open-source to support your infrastructure.
- You are a small-to-medium business, and the lower upfront cost outweighs the added implementation and security ownership.
- You have the means to reconfigure the gateway for your specific domain and use case.
Buying a managed MCP gateway makes sense when one or more of these apply:
- You are operating at enterprise scale and must govern an increasingly large number of MCP servers.
- You are allowing read and write access to sensitive data and high-privilege endpoints.
- You need flexible multi-tool scoping for role-based, team-based, user-based, or other customized granular permissions.
- You require SOC 2 compliance, paired with deep observability and auditability features.
- You are providing an MCP server for others, such as external users or partners, to consume.
- You already use an API or AI gateway provider that supports MCP. For example, Zuplo MCP Gateway is a native feature within Zuplo’s API gateway platform.
MCP gateways are specialized infrastructure
For simple use cases in isolated scenarios, a homemade proxy or static MCP registry might suffice. However, on the whole, MCP gateways should not be viewed as throwaway middleware. They are core infrastructure built by specialists, and they are becoming an increasingly important asset within the new enterprise AI stack, alongside coding tools, agents, and cutting-edge protocols.
Due to the complexity of MCP gateways and the security imperative of using a mature implementation, a fully managed MCP gateway built and maintained by specialists will likely be the superior choice for most enterprise users. Gateways like Zuplo MCP Gateway provide this, enabling enterprises to adopt MCP at scale, quickly, at a relatively low cost, and with greater peace of mind.